When the prison banned board games, we played chess in our minds | Hacker News Reader

When the prison banned board games, we played chess in our minds

themarshallproject.org

292 pointsdanso250 comments

My grandmother[1] was a political prisoner and her favourite pastime while in prison was poetry. Since the inmates weren't allowed to have any possessions, not even a strip of paper, she composed poems in her head. She later published them in a poetry collection and I know people who memorized the entire collection. She herself had a phenomenal memory for poetry. Her friends would often call and ask for her to tell them the lyrics of old songs and poems, and even in her late 70s she never failed to answer their request without consulting her library. My mum once challenged her and asked her to recite the 50 minute-long Máj[2]. If she weren't interrupted after 10 minutes, she probably would have recited the entire thing. She was able to memorize a poem after hearing it just once and it seemed that she retained poems indefinitely. I don't know whether this talent was the result of 6 years in an environment where memory is the only means to persist information, but it seems likely that it played a role.

Another less impressive anecdatum is my own experience of about a year with a phone that couldn't remember phone numbers. In the beginning I memorized numbers out of necessity. By the end of the year I had a mental address book of about 30 numbers and new numbers could be added effortlessly. The bewildered looks of people giving me their number without me pulling out a phone to write it down were priceless.

[1]: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C5%BEena_Kuklov%C3%A1-J%C3%...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjoX5y_JZ40

When you memorized numbers that way, did you "see" the numbers in your mind's eye? And when you went to recall it, did you basically read it from that impression? I sometimes memorize numbers and other strings that way.

It feels as though I simultaneously remember and recall an image of the number as well as its numeric value. What helps me remember the numeric value is identifying its interesting properties and patterns.

This mental phone book improved my ability to memorize other types of random strings. On one occasion I memorized a 20-digit hexadecimal license key, though I had to read it about three times. The client who watched as I keyed it in was very impressed. On a second thought it isn't that impressive given it's 12 digits short of a UUID.

Not the GP, but for me, in the context of numbers that I use on a keypad (or, ahem, in the context of a rotary dial), the physical actions are linked into the memorization, along with some combination of aural and visual memory.

In ancient Indian mathematics, people would compose poetry based on tables of numbers, so that things such as sine tables, and the value of pi up to certain number of decimal places, were easier to remember [1]. A delightful example given in the site is "Milk is best for breakfast, when it is morning, it should be stirred. But Gopālan says there is no milk - the number of days of English months in order.", which in the appropriate alphabet, represents the number of days in the months of the Gregorian calendar.

[1] https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Katapayadi_System#:~:text=In%20...

There’s a literary organization/movement called Oulipo[1] that similarly works with patterns and algorithms to creatively restrict or generate writing.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

If you want to remember the first digits of Pi, use this:

“How I wish I could calculate Pi” 3.141592

That's neat :)

"How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics" gets you a few digits further (but of course yours is plenty accurate for calculating)

Lovely! Thanks :)

I've learned a trick using the knuckles of the hand to remember the days of the months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle_mnemonic

If anybody wants to play chess in their minds, Lichess has a option to turn the pieces invisible [1]. It's not quite as hard as playing by voice as you have the move list you can refer to but it's a start.

[1] https://lichess.org/account/preferences/game-display bottom of the page

There is also an option to have the computer read moves to you and you can make moves and query the state of the board by typing commands. Streamers use this to play blindfolded, while the stream shows the board position normally to viewers.

I’m an active user of Lichess and never knew about this mode. Thanks for sharing!

Another option is "Move list while playing", which you can set to never. I haven't tried it yet, but combining these two should get you there.

This is really going to help Wally's quest to GM. Playing blindfolded is one of the best training tools in the box. They'll get better at being able to see deeper and deeper without needing to touch the pieces on the board.

"Becoming a GM" only seems possible for people who reached master strength by their early teens. Some people have attained GM later in life, 30s, 40s and even older - but all GMs have been child prodigies and most - if not all - attain International Master in their teens or early twenties.

It's certainly rare, but it's not unheard of.

Mikhail Chigorin apparently learned the rules of chess at 16, but only really started playing at 27.

Gersz Salwe started playing around age 20, and apparently entered his first tournament at 36.

And in terms of blooming late, Oscar Shapiro and Bernard Friend became GMs in their 70s.

(Also, I don't see it stated anywhere that the prisoner was not an exceptionally-talented youth.)

Chigorin and Salwe were both born in the mid-1800s. With the prevalence of chess computers for training and studying, the amount of strength you need to play at a top level is much higher these days.

On the other hand its never been easier to get that kind of information. It's probably easier than ever to reach Candidate Master (2000 Elo). GM, maybe harder, but definitely could see the argument otherwise.

The skill required for a particular ELO is relative to the strength of all the other players. More learning resources that are available to everyone can't provide a comparative advantage, which is what you need to move up. Part of the reason the Soviets dominated for so long is they had developed a training program that the rest of the world did not have access to.

I don't think it is just the computers. The training environments and systems for learning advanced quite far without the engines. Kasparov didn't train with computers in his prime and he is still very strong by modern standards. More children were encouraged to pursue chess...in the 19th century many people (such as Paul Morphy) would consider a professional chess player in roughly the same social tier as a professional gambler. If you look at many of the games from that era it seems like only 20 people in the world even knew how to play chess.

Indeed, Morphy once said "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life".

> "Becoming a GM" only seems possible for people who reached master strength by their early teens.

Mostly, I think, because becoming a GM is a full-time job and you don't earn any money while doing it.

You need to go to a lot of tournaments around the world, continuously study to get prepared for opponents, and have enough money to fund it all.

So, you really have to want it as an adult and have nothing else that you would prefer to do.

That's kinda true for most things in competitive arenas, right? Sports, chess, e gaming, etc. I hate it, but at mid life I'm way slower thinking than I was 20 years ago, there's no chance I could compete with young people on raw talent in many areas, I might win some online games because of superior strategy, but I'll never have the speed to beat young, experienced gamers.

It's plenty possible, but few have the desire to put in that much work as they get older. There are people who play at near-GM-level strength in tournaments reflected in their single tournament evaluations, but don't play enough to obtain 2500+ rating or score enough GM norms in major tournaments.

There's a even a guy from Russia who is 2550ish rating and isn't even an IM because he hasn't scored enough norms, and is 3000+ bullet/blitz on Chesscom, which is incredibly elite.

Someone picking up chess at age 25 could certainly become a GM. They just usually don't have the desire for it.

If it were possible it would have happened in the last 100 years. What people lack at the age of 25 (or even 17) is the neuroplasticity required to turn their brain into an analytical chess engine.

I don’t think it’s actually correct that all GMs were child prodigies.

At least since the 20th century I haven't been able to find an exception. Even GMs who did not get their GM titles until late in life were very strong players as children. For example Ben Finegold did not get his last norm to become GM until he was 40, but he was a USCF master at age 14. All the other stories I've seen are similar. I've also yet been unable to find more than two or three people who started playing seriously after age 25 and ever broke 2000 FIDE.

We used to play connect 4 like this in high school, it’s frustratingly difficult to remember the game state but it’s easy to play (you just call out the column). You can easily forget the board position if you think too long about a move and as the game progresses it becomes more difficult to keep track of the game state. But it’s a lot of fun, I can imagine it becomes a lot easier over time especially when they are so experienced in chess.

I had a friend in high school who would play mental chess while weight training. He claimed it was good practice for his golf game; I think he was just showing off.

I find it impossible to do any abstract thinking while lifting.

There is a book "Schachnovelle" by Stefan Zweig (don't know the English title) who starts to play against himself in while in prison. Good read.

The Royal Game apparently

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game

Genuinely thought they were both going to get put in solitary and have their sentences extended for engaging in gang activities, based on their coded messages to each other. Good God, but I have low expectations of this prison system.

Reminds me Natan Sharansky story. Being jailed in Soviet prison, in solitary confinement he played chess in his mind. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25560162

>"“alligator” for A, “baseball” for B, “constellation” for C, “dinosaur” for D, “elephant” for E and “golf ball” for G.

Shame there wasn't anyone to share "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, etc" with them. It works well in practice, has less syllables, and probably has many in prison that already know it.

I'm sure the words they chose sounded suspicious if heard repeatedly but if heard just occasionally they were probably less so than words like Delta, Foxtrot, Tango, etc.

On the contrary. It's beautiful to see what people come up with when they're not tethered to the norm.

Perhaps. "Constellation" is particularly odd to me though. There are lots of unique lesser used words with 2 syllables instead of 4. So I'm curious why they chose it.

They were working with different constraints: Speed doesn't matter, it doesn't have to work internationally, and their alphabet is limited to A-H.

Having words of different length makes it easier to distinguish them.

Also, I have a suspicion why the article leaves out "F".

Yeah, it's a shame there was no one to share the most well-known way to relate words to the alphabet that likely many of the guards would already be familiar with.

Had you considered they chose these words for good reason?

I am curious, for example, why "Constellation" and not, say, "Comet". I've done quite a lot of volunteer work for jails and prisons, so yes, I'm dismissive that the guards would care about that. The article mentions they are using a chessboard, noting moves, etc. Nothing about keeping it secret. What was banned was face to face board games in common areas.

Issues with guards come from different scenarios than this one. The cell areas are typically very loud and chaotic from a noise perspective. That's mentioned in the article.

On the other hand, using your own phonetic alphabet is a way to disambiguate your communications in a noisy channel. If someone hears someone say "Charlie 6" they could be talking about anything. But "constellation 6" is almost definitely a chess game.

This reminds me of this story of a man who played mental chess in a soviet gulag to stay sane.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25560162

>> At the heart of our mental chess game lies a profound lesson: It is easy to play the victim in life, to allow your circumstances to dictate your disposition. But the difference between being content or distraught is a matter of perspective.

Good advice, but only as long as you don't let the bastards that screwed you up get away with it just because you got over it. Don't let yourself be fine with letting others treat you like dirt.

The vast majority of people are in prison on non-violent drug charges; it is horrific how society believes that they are all horrible people who deserve to be there and doesn't care about them at all. Even under normal circumstances, the institution cares little for their rehabilitation, and now they are under atrocious conditions such as these. Many psychologists consider solitary confinement to be a form of torture, but as we know, in covid times that no longer matters.

I'm hoping there's some broad reform coming for jails and prisons in the US. Currently, there's no uniformity in the way prisoners are treated. It's not unusual, in the US, for a prison to have no television, no books, little actually edible food, limited human interaction, etc. You can't even write a letter if you don't have someone on the outside funding your commissary account.

That setup, of course, just ends up being a gladiator school and/or permanent psychosis camp.

Yep. It boils down to rehabilitation v. retribution. Rehabilitation is effective at preventing recidivism. Retribution is politically expedient.

And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.

"if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail"

That's a great point that I haven't seen discussed in the media. When I was young, only "Fortune 500" type companies could afford background checks, so you had a fighting chance at getting a decent job.

Now, anybody can buy a instant background check online, and you can get not just felony data, but misdemeanor data, and even "just arrests, not convictions". And it's dirt cheap to do so. So, job prospects are dim, and even simple stuff like renting an apartment is difficult as well.

It'll also show offenses which have been expunged from your record.

This concept of background check on the US is strange.

In France, once you left prison, it means that you have served what you had to serve and start again. Nobody can check whether you did prison or not.

Some specific jobs require a document stating your juridical past but you bring it, this is not some can do on their own.

Then you have military and sensitive civil servants jobs where this is checked for you, but it is really specific.

I would not be happy if anybody could check my past online...

I'm sure there's more in play, but the concept of "At Will Employment" we have in the US creates an environment where only very specifically legally defined discrimination counts as such (race, gender, etc). Outside of that you can fire, or not hire, anyone, for any arbitrary reason you want...even for "no reason given".

So in the US there are rules around court data being public so companies scoop up that data and basically package it as a background check. This data is also enriched with voting data which is also public in most states which includes the people living in your home and other info. The company ADP which deals with paychecks also sells your income information to third parties so someone running a basic background check can actually know where you live, who you live with and how much you make.

Luckily the french did give us a tool to fight against this bullshit, it is called the guillotine?

I think a less radical solution would be a bit more of "socialism" in the good sense (social protection, protection of the job etc.).

It has its pros and cons, but the pros IMO win - bringing some peace of mind to people.

Can't have "socialism", that's un-american. Now, guillotines, those are french therefore okay, like pastries.

>I think a less radical solution would be a bit more of "socialism" in the good sense (social protection, protection of the job etc.).

That's not what socialism is. Socialism isn't stuff you like done by the government.

Neither of those things need to be "done by the government". Unionization covers "protection of the job", and mutual aid covers "social protection".

Though yes, if the state is to exist, the least it should be doing is providing for its people - in my opinion via UBI + single-payer healthcare at minimum.

Socialism as a concept is super wide. Many Western European countries are socialist democracies (France, Sweden, ...) and proud of it. We actually like what we have (but we always protest anyway).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Europe

It seems to be the same in Australia from what I can see. We have "police checks" where the police certify that you have not been involved in any crime specific to the job you apply for. So if you have committed fraud, you could not get a job at a bank. And if you are a sex offender, you could not get a job with kids. But as far as I know, a fraud can get a job at a school and a sex offender can get a job at a bank and the employer would not know anything.

That seems quite fair and even practical.

What makes this potentially complicated in the US is each state being a different jurisdiction. While states aren't really anything like "countries" in the European statehood sense of the word, they keep separate records by design, and there are often no interoperable systems for exchanging data. This is why there is no "USA marriage certificate" in the US, there's simply no nation wide record of marriages.

I'd guess the industry built around background checks and the like is partially a response to this. There isn't a national registry of crimes, at least not all kinds, so you could game the Australian system by just crossing state borders. Hence companies selling collections of people's (technically) public record. A solution may be to just create more national registries, but this seems antithetical to the US's idea of statehood. Maybe it'd be for the best, though...

It seems to be that the US ends up with the worst of both systems. States are not separate countries so they can not deny access like another country would deny a rapist from immigrating but they are also not unified so they can't take any collective action.

Seems to be the core of the covid situation too. There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.

> There is no unified plan and guidance but states doing well can't shut borders to continue doing well.

Can't or won't? If California can get away with its agricultural checkpoints without running afoul of e.g. the Commerce Clause, then it seems like restricting interstate border crossings is at least hypothetically possible.

In practice, it's pretty trivial to bypass those checkpoints if you really want to smuggle produce into the state (e.g. the I-80 checkpoint, where you can take the Hirschdale Road exit and follow Glenshire Drive to 287, then get right back on I-80). I highly doubt COVID checkpoints would be any harder to bypass.

It is discussed in the media pretty often.

By now, it is just accepted that it is terrible, so it is less sensational.

Searching 'criminal record employment' in Google News yields > 600,000 results.

'Ban the box' gives millions of results

'clean slate law' gives > 80k results

No it doesn't. It's perfectly fair to be against the lack of uniformity in how prisoners are treated without being against retributive justice. That prisoners' lives should not depend on "the whims of the prison's management" (as another poster put it) is just common sense.

You're right in theory, but in practice, being in favor of retributive "justice" tends to go hand in hand with an acceptance of arbitrary application of said "justice", for reasons typically along the lines of "if you wanted humane treatment then you should've thought about that before being a hard-bitten criminal scumbag" (exaggerating, obviously, but not by much).

Well, if you do give them practical job training, another voting segment is going to scream bloody murder at "prison labor".

It's not lack of skills that's being cited here. It's being unemployed because of your criminal background check.

They're not independent. Sufficient skills can overcome the stigma of a criminal record. But providing prisoners skills usually involves some on-the-job training to be useful.

> Sufficient skills can overcome the stigma of a criminal record.

Not when there's an HR department in between the applicant and the hiring manager. People with "sufficient skills" get rejected all the time for reasons far more benign than e.g. having killed someone 30 years ago.

Like, this ain't about "stigma". This is about Kafkaesque corporate bureaucracy actively driving crime rates.

So you're saying the problem isn't the prison system.

I'm saying the problem ain't just the prison system - and neither is the punishment.

That sounds like a straw man. There's a big difference between practical "practical job training" and "breaking rocks."

If the labor is entirely volunteer and something that actually requires some training, it's job training. If it's forced (which is legal in many states) and it's entirely grunt work like janitorial duty or highway cleanup, then it's prison labor.

It's not a strawman that some people scream bloody murder for any use of prison labor.

Bloomberg famously took flak for using paid, voluntary prison labor for call centers -- not exactly back-breaking labor.

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/24/mike-bloomberg-2020-pris...

Just because you're not personally uncharitable enough to object to something like that, doesn't man it's not a common view.

Per your article:

> John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers. The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.

> When asked if their total monthly earnings are capped at these levels, Scallan said incarcerated people who work for ProCom make far higher wages. “I can tell you unequivocally that is not us,” Scallan said. “Some of them are making that much every day.”

> The Oklahoma Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify the discrepancy, nor to answer questions about ProCom’s arrangement with the Bloomberg campaign.

Given the refusal to clarify that discrepancy, it ain't unreasonable to assume - barring concrete evidence to the contrary - that these prisoners are being paid a pittance for their labor, and Bloomberg - and ProCom, and the state of Oklahoma - definitely deserve any flak coming to them for that exploitation. The very fact that there is a maximum monthly wage for prisoners at all, let alone one as pathetically low as $27.09 per month, is barbaric.

Oh, so Bloomberg's primary objection -- and the outraged people's primary objection -- was that they weren't get paid a fair wage, not to the mere fact of prison labor? Then why can't I seem to find anyone saying anything to this effect, anywhere?

Because as best I can tell, the objection is exactly the "strawman" I originally alleged, that prison labor shouldn't be used, even when rehabilitative and helps the prisoner find employment after release.

> Then why can't I seem to find anyone saying anything to this effect, anywhere?

Because that's strongly implied to be the reason for any objection at all - i.e. the coercion of prisoners into working for a pathetically low wage, and the exploitation of that coercion for financial gain. Unless you can think of some other reason why people object to prison labor other than it being coercive and exploitative?

A couple points:

- I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.

- On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions; it's legal slavery (quite literally; the 13th Amendment carved out prison labor as an exception to the abolition of slavery). Prison laborers need the ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions, and this negotiation is currently impossible because prisons can compel them by threat of violence to accept any terms, no matter how unfair to the worker. Indeed, if prisoners were fairly compensated for their labor, they might be able to save up enough money to not feel as strong of a need to return to a life of crime should they remain shunned by employers, per above (and hell, they might even be able to bootstrap themselves a startup and sidestep said shunning entirely).

>I was more referring to job opportunities after release; even if an inmate received a bunch of hands-on training while incarcerated, a lot of public and private sector employers alike consider a criminal record to be a disqualification. This makes getting a job harder, which makes supporting oneself legitimately harder, which makes crime more attractive to put food on the table, which drives recidivism.

That's irrelevant to the question of whether prisons are wrong to provide it.

>On the topic of inmate vocational training and prison labor, the primary objections to said labor revolve around the lack of compensation (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude less than federal minimum wage) and poor working conditions

As in the cousin thread, this may be your objection, but it isn't the popular objection; Bloomberg was famously forced to drop prison labor, regardless of the terms offered.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26392005

I think you can have a level of both. Obviously we don't want crime to be free of consequence, but we also don't want inmates to commit crimes again after their sentence(both for the sake of others and their own). In the US, we mostly care about retribution, even when we say that we want reformation. All the time I hear from people about how we need to focus on rehabilitation, but then hear a lot of the same people shout "lock 'em up!" even for property crimes.

I'm not one to be in the "America is bad at everything" camp, but I think one of the most negative aspects of our culture is that we act entitled to everything like the world is Burger King and we should get everything our way(or your money back). Fries too cold? Send 'em back and don't tip the server! Someone backed into our rear fender? Sue 'em for all they've got! Someone stole your TV? Lock 'em up and throw away the key! It all stems from materialism.

Years ago I read an interview with a prison warden. The interviewer at the end asked him what he would want the public to understand. The warden said, I would like the public to understand that everyone here is going to get out eventually.

I live in Canada although did visit US few times. In my opinion the United States is great. Problem I think is that it is great at too many things. It had accomplished incredibly good things. It had also fucked things up royally. And keeps doing all of this. For the people I think it would be worth paying more attention to the dark side.

Permanent psychosis camp is an apt description. The US makes its prisons as hellish as possible – and post-prison life as difficult as possible – as a form of punishment, and that results in some of the highest rates of recidivism in the world.

What's worse is that people get incarcerated for increasingly severe crimes. A drug offender spending a stint in prison is very likely to go back in for a more violent crime with a few years of release.

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/may/3/long-term-re...

"get incarcerated for increasingly severe crimes"

I'm guessing at least partly due to the "gladiator school" aspect.

Even without that it would be a vicious circle. You might initially lead a fairly normal life with some "side-hustle" to earn a little cash, and go to prison for that. Now when you come out you are an ex convict (with barely any assets because life in prison is expensive). So you look for a space to rent (that takes ex-cons) and a job (that hires ex-cons). Chances are you won't find a full-time job, so you turn to crime to pay your rent. But now crime turned from a side-hustle to a half-time job.

I broadly agree with you but I think you're ascribing too much coherent judicial intention to the way we treat prisoners. Sure, people are sent there as punishment, but it seems more like the way they're treated once they get there is mostly down to profit motive on the part of big prison-industrial players who outright run some prisons and provide services to most (all?) others, and individual depravity on the part of the bullies and sadists who are drawn to working in the industry.

Just the fact that I can reasonably call it an "industry" should be setting off major alarm bells. Our prison system is one of the most terrifying and evil things that exist in the real world.

That's definitely part of it. The way they suck the prisoner's families dry is particularly shitty, for things like phone calls, letters (jPay), commissary, charges to see the doctor (yes, really), and so on.

Unfortunately, a judge may get a kickback from a for profit prison: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2020-06-23/kids-for-....

It doesn't stop there. For profit prisons spend millions of dollars lobbying: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries./indus.php?ind=G7000

If you want to see intent, follow the money.

The USA would be a different country if it finally got around to banning bribery

I agree, though sometimes it's not actually bribery. If a company, for example, offers inmate telecom services to a prison, and offers to do it at "no cost at all to the state" or "revenue share", it sounds attractive. Of course, that means "exorbitant costs to the prisoner's families".

"Revenue share" makes the bribery apparent.

This is one of the things that needs regulation, because there will be a monopoly.

Revenue share isn’t bribery because the revenue isn’t shared with the judge. It’s a cost structure to make the municipality or whatever avoid having to outlay money to build something.

Similar to some joint public/private toll roads, red light cameras, etc.

It is banned, thats why they use the workarounds. Prohibition frequently doesn’t eliminate.

If you can de-incentivize a behavior, you can prevent it. But just 'banning bribery' has already been done. Banning any and all perverse incentives from the justice system is actually very difficult to the point of near-impossibility. Hence the current system.

Except that when we hear of a for-profit nursing home abusing its residents, we are shocked, and set up an inquiry, and pass some laws about how people need to be treated.

When we hear about how prisoners are treated -- actually we hardly ever hear about how prisoners are treated, because most people don't care that much.

The way society is ok with the treatment of prisoners is the root cause of the way they are treated. Plenty of for-profit enterprises exist that aren't allowed to abuse those they have power over.

The cheapest prison is one run by the prisoners themselves. Just post guards on the walls.

Unlikely. Far too many people willingly short-circuit all rationality in favor of ineffective, but emotionally-satisfying stances like being "tough on crime".

Treating prisoners as crappy as they can get away with is usually something in favor of a US politician with any ability to do something about it.

I’m not optimistic about it, but I do wonder if the experience of living through a pandemic will give folks a fresh perspective on just how rough imprisonment is, and a willingness to consider alternatives. If it’s torture to be stuck in your own home for a year—with your own bed, food, schedule, entertainment, family, and hot water—just imagine how much worse it must be for someone locked up in a cage for decades without even those basic freedoms. If you believe that long prison sentencing is a deterrent, and someone told you that breaking a law would cause you to have to live another year of pandemic life, does that not feel deterrent enough?

Has pandemic lockdown really changed that many people’s views? In some countries it has become a faux pas to complain about lockdown conditions. Often that is because people don’t want to hear complaining about things we seemingly have little control over, but sometimes it is because some people honestly don’t see any problem with life in lockdown.

For example, when scientific advisors to some governments appear in national media and say there could be upsides to maintaining social distancing for potentially years into the future, and this evokes little popular outcry outside a tiny fringe of wacko “great reset”/antivaxxer conspiracy theorists on Twitter, then you start to wonder if a lot of the population has simply accepted the new normal. That might create less sympathy with prisoners, not more.

Extending COVID restrictions for years into the future would cause huge outcry, what are you talking about? I would immediately join protests and do everything in my power to get the current government out if that happened, and I'm not one for "viva la revolución!" normally.

We're coming up on a year of restrictions now, and many countries simply haven't seen much protest activity. Politics in some Asian and European countries is very much consensus-based, and if the main parties have converged on the idea of maintaining some level of social distancing, there isn’t much space for the populace to voice opposition to that.

Large protests in those countries tend to be unlikely because 1) protests have been banned on epidemological grounds, and the authorities have made it clear that any protest will be swiftly suppressed by the police, and 2) QAnon and antivaxxer conspiracy theorists tend to be very visible at protests, and normal people are unwilling to be associated with that. So, the bulk of the population is not going to be willing to go out and protest.

I live in the Netherlands, and there definitely has been a great deal of protesting and general mayhem. More than a dozen cities had large protests, vandalism.. we had a group chat where people told others about places where this was going to happen in my city, in our case to avoid them, but for others to coordinate.

Mind you, heavy lockdown measures have only been here for a couple of months. I have no doubt if the government makes a step towards keeping it for years, the protests will reignite.

Regarding 1), that stops absolutely nobody here. The city center is bustling with crowds, and protests for other issues still happen, there is no "police squashing".

2), that is a USA-centric view. There is little QAnon talk over here.

A lot of the news coverage of the Netherlands protests has been saying that they aren’t principled people disagreeing with COVID policy, but rather just young and marginalized people enjoying a chance to go wild and engage in vandalism. (Just like the 2005 French car-torchings were only very slightly based on minority grievances, and otherwise just young people going crazy.) Meanwhile, polls show that the Dutch population broadly supports the restrictions. As someone there in the country, do you feel this is inaccurate?

And no, not an American-centric view. QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.

The news coverage of "rowdy" protests is always the same: "not real protesters, young people going crazy". Mostly regurgitations from the police chief and the mayor, who obviously have incentive to downplay the intentions of the protesters. They are not completely wrong, of course, but you should take what they say with a grain of salt.

> As someone there in the country, do you feel this is inaccurate?

It's split. Some support the current measures. Some do not. Privately, in my own experience, most are much more unhappy with the measures than they let on publicly. The common phrasing I hear from the hopefuls is "at least it might end soon". If it does not, they might have a change of mind.

> QAnon has become a very visible thing in anti-lockdown social media and protests here in Eastern Europe.

Yes, in Eastern Europe that might be true.. over here, I would be hard pressed to find someone who has even heard of it.

My view from the Netherlands is that days getting longer will be an issue. If the 9 pm curfew is still in effect when it's still light outside at 9 pm, it will be disobeyed much more widely.

Currently it has been extended until the evening of March 30 (which is two days after the clocks go forward for spring). That evening, the sun will set at 8.11 pm in Amsterdam.

A further (hypothetical) three-week extension would AIUI take it to the point where the curfew would come into effect before the streetlights came on.

Very good point! Due to the relaxing of rules around outside crowds and sports, I have good hope they will remove or at least extend the curfew past 9PM.

Instead of looking for protests, perhaps a better (though still imperfect) signal to gauge sentiment about living under pandemic restrictions is to look at how much vaccine demand there is, and how aggressively some governments have acted to ease restrictions. After all, there aren’t constant protests in prisons, either, and I don’t think you’ll find many people saying they’re better off imprisoned than they were on the outside. (Yes, there are outliers—let’s not argue making the exception into the rule.)

If most people were truly comfortable with the status quo, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there would be such overwhelming demand for vaccines, nor does it seem like there would be a constant push to (often prematurely) end pandemic restrictions in so many areas.

I’ve been unable to find any poll asking people specifically about whether they enjoy the restrictions, so I can’t give a definitive answer, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that if people could wave a magic wand and make the pandemic go away tomorrow, they would. And that’s after only a year of relatively minor restrictions on daily life, not 5 or 10 or 50 years of being held in captivity.

> And that’s after only a year of relatively minor restrictions on daily life, not 5 or 10 or 50 years of being held in captivity.

Not to understate the restriction involved in being imprisoned, but “relatively minor restrictions on daily life” is really understating the experience of many people over the past year.

I haven’t seen my parents, sibling, 1-year-old nephew, most of my friends, and any of my co-workers in over a year. I haven’t taken any vacation time because there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’m fortunate that I’m comfortably employed, but none of my regular activities are happening, so my life is essentially in a holding pattern where every day is just some variation of working from home, cooking for myself, working out by myself, and reading.

Really? Because slowly pushing back opening dates and such leads people with no specific event to protest about.

I have supported 90% of the steps my fairly-restrictive government has taken so far, because they are backed by science. Would I be happy if they were extended indefinitely? Well, no. But, realistically, how would I know that was happening?

If schools are not fully-opened next fall I would definitely be raising a bit of a ruckus. But if Dr Fauci and all the other scientists were saying they really couldn't be re-opened because we were in the middle of another wave? Well, I'm not anti-science.

You can debate each step, but I really don't think that a continual drip-drip of extensions would raise a huge outcry at all.

This is a bit of a Ship of Theseus. When would you know they're extending lockdown indefinitely, if they keep extending it? Never, but that's besides the point.

Some are already quite annoyed with the extensions. Some keep getting more annoyed. Some are becoming accustomed. The question really is: what percentage of people will adapt, and what percentage will revolt?

Keep in mind that it does not need to a majority of people choosing (if choosing is the right word for what is more determined by innate personality traits) to revolt for it to happen. Even a relatively small percentage of sufficiently ravenous people igniting trouble is enough to aggravate the situation of the rest, causing more economic and social trouble. This would further push the society into disarray, and a surefire way to induce people to rise up is to create chaos in a system (historically, hunger was a good motivator).

My point is, I think you're watching the pot before it boils, and declaring it will never boil.

edit: actually, Zeno's paradox might be a better fit here

We're now going on year 2, with limited protests, and vaccines being promised "soon" with "soon" slowly moving further and further away.

That said, the restrictions are being released despite it being a bad idea, and I think the government realizes that they can't really tighten them without risking violent protests.

> vaccines being promised "soon" with "soon" slowly moving further and further away.

In March 2020, the US government said it would take 12–18 months to get a vaccine approved, and many people even doubted that was possible[0]. Instead, it happened just 9 months later[1].

In the United States, the current president first said it was unlikely everyone would be vaccinated before the end of summer[2], then they shifted to having enough vaccine for 300 million people by the end of July[3], and most recently an announcement that there will be supply for the entire population at the end of May[4].

I don’t know where you live, but at least in the U.S., things have been the opposite of “‘soon’ slowly moving further and further away”.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/COVID-19-vaccine-rush...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/health/pfizer-vaccine-aut...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/biden-coronav...

[3] https://apnews.com/b7845a7d0f709199265d9243598b629e

[4] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/541283-biden-us-...

Not everyone here is American. Europeans have seen vaccination pushed back due to delays in supplies and issues with registering for the shot.

Also, some scientific advisors are saying that the present vaccines may be insufficient to fully lift restrictions, and we ought to wait for more advanced boosters to deal with variants.

Hardly. I will simulate a response to you:

> I can't believe you would complain about living IN YOUR OWN HOME nice and comfortable while PEOPLE ARE DYING. To compare this to prison is an INSULT to OUR HEALTHCARE HEROES. We're IN A PANDEMIC

There are enough loud voices from people with high Right-Wing Authoritarian Scores (which isn't a Republican/Democrat axis, before you decide I'm being needlessly political) that will shout you down.

As a personal test, I am buying GEO and CoreCivic to see how much I believe.

Controversies around even the idea of prisoners getting the vaccine, as a vulnerable population, seem to suggest the perspective will not change, I think: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

Unfortunately a large part of the population is conditioned to not see convicts as people, let alone citizens deserving of any kind of rights or freedoms

see: The consistent running "joke" throughout American pop culture of men getting raped on a regular basis

It's supposed to be a severe punishment, usually reserved for serious or repeat offenders.

If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?

Most importantly, why should that person work their ass off for another week, instead of going somewhere else, stealing something, and enjoying the remaining 39 hours off?

House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.

It'd be good to consider what percentage of the jail/prison population is actually incarcerated for serious crimes. https://mkorostoff.github.io/incarceration-in-real-numbers/

> It's supposed to be a severe punishment, usually reserved for serious or repeat offenders.

First, prison in general, and long sentences in particular, are generally not used that way.

Second, why are you trying to punish people for what they’ve done instead of trying to help them so they can learn to do something other than crime and contribute to society?

> If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute, and the thief got caught doing this for the third time (which means the thief likely also got away with it dozens of times), what then?

Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things (necessarily, as you have said it was the fruit of a minimum-wage worker) to survive.

(A side note: as of 2017, prisoners in the United States with jobs get paid, on average, a maximum of $3.45 per day[0], if you want to compare yet another situation that is worse than working for minimum wage.)

> House arrest exists, but it depends on that person not just ignoring it and running away, and is significantly milder for the reasons you listed.

The point I was making is that house arrest is not that mild at all, and that maybe more people will realise this after being in house-arrest-lite for a year and have more reluctance to subject fellow humans to even harsher and more cruel conditions.

[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

> Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things

There are antisocial and lazy people everywhere, even in places with a better welfare system than the US. The phone snatching and bike stealing gangs of London aren't doing it to pay for their mum's cancer treatment or to provide food for their kids, they do it because one fun night of robbery pays more than a boring week of work in a grocery or a building site.

> Perhaps focus on why you live in a society where people feel like they need to steal low value things (necessarily, as you have said it was the fruit of a minimum-wage worker) to survive.

“Need” is rarely why people steal. The calculus is, “I want this thing, I don’t have an ethical problem taking it, I think I can get away from it.”

Look, I understand the appeal of an argument that paints criminals as simply having poor morals, but it is a completely false and reductive argument that does not capture the complexity behind why people commit crimes. It’s easy to ‘be ethical’ when your needs are taken care of and you’re in an environment that supports you and guides you into being a healthy member of society.

When I say “need”, I don’t mean literally in the sense of “I need to steal that thing or I will die”. I mean it in the sense of a person being satisfied in enough aspects of their life, and having the necessary skills, to turn themselves away from committing crime.

>having the necessary skills, to turn themselves away from committing crime.

I grew up running with a sketchy crowd. I knew several people who stole things on a recurring basis. None of them did it because they were desperate or had “poor morals”.

You’re deriving this from an incorrect mental model where nobody “wants to steal” and they do it out of desperation. This leaves out people who steal for the thrill, steal because they literally have no moral problem with taking from huge corporations, etc.,

I think you’ll find nearly identical justifications between a guy that votes for someone to raise taxes on mega corporations and an anarchist who just steals from them directly.

> You’re deriving this from an incorrect mental model where nobody “wants to steal” and they do it out of desperation.

Wow, I’m not thinking that way at all. If that’s how it came across, I did a really bad job at explaining myself!

I don’t want to get into a huge thing, especially on an old thread, but what I was trying to get across is that I don’t think it’s good enough to just look at someone who commits a crime and say that it happened because they are ‘bad’, that all the blame is theirs, that society has no culpability.

When I say “need”, I don’t mean destitution. So take your example of stealing for a thrill. Why aren’t they getting enough thrill in other parts of their life? What easier or better thrill could be offered instead that doesn’t involve hurting other people? They clearly have an unfulfilled need for a thrill, and they are fulfilling it by stealing.

When I say “skills”, I don’t mean like job skills. I mean things like the skill of knowing how to talk through anger instead of physically attacking somebody. The skills of emotional regulation. Stuff that may be natural and intuitive for some, but foreign and unknown to others.

I believe that if we handled crime the same way we handle things like plane crashes—investigate without judging, look at more than just the individual, and help people instead of punishing them—there would be much less crime, it would be less serious, and suffering would be immensely reduced. But it’s way harder than just going “well, this person’s a piece of shit and they deserve be imprisoned until they’re 80 years old”.

> If someone works their ass off at minimum wage for a week, just to have the fruit of their work stolen in a minute

You're talking about white collar crime and financial exploitation, which generally is illegal but isn't punished, or is actually legalized. The kind of people who go to prison are lucky if they steal two or three days worth of your work.

I think gp is just talking about theft/robbery in general without specifying the type.

> I'm hoping there's some broad reform coming for jails and prisons in the US.

Doubtful. Prison reform isn't popular at all amongst voting blocs that matter to politicians and it's a hard sell to the public tuned into a "safety first" and "lock 'em up and throw away the key" attitude.

I say I'm hopeful because there have been meaningful changes in bail reform and decriminalizing drug possession recently. Some attitudes do seem to be changing.

I think suburban America broadly does not want psychopaths running around which is what burglars and drug dealers become when they spend 10 years in prison.

"then they don't deserve being released" -- suburban America

I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t send people to jail for more than 3 months if they’re not going for their entire lives. I don’t want people coming out of a place like that into my suburban neighborhood.

This is interesting. Is the 3 months number something arbitrary? Are there major groups advocating this? Beyond limiting the harm if prison, short stints could make gangs harder to form in non-lifer prisons.

Would that not push for more life sentences? Would you now send a rapist to prison for life instead of 10 or so years? 3 months is far too short.

Sure, send the rapists and murderers and child molesters to life without parole. The rest of the violent criminals to Singapore style whipping which is actually far more humane than prison.

I don't think I agree with this, but it has made me think about the problem differently.

We don't send somebody to the hospital for "30 days", or "1 year". We don't do it when putting somebody under the care of a psychiatrist either. We deal with the patient until they're recovered.

Perhaps this should be the approach we take with prisoners. They're in prison until a professional determines they're rehabilitated and ready to reintegrate back into the rest of society. With—potentially—minimum and maximum durations to ensure some safety rails on the system.

I have to admit I don't know what this looks like, and I don't mean to gloss over the fact that there are incredibly difficult questions this raises that don't have good answers (what does it mean for a murderer to be "rehabilitated"?), but I do wonder if at least considering the problem from this perspective might prove helpful.

But prisons right now make them worse the longer they spend in there. The logic breaks down.

Of course, but that's the whole problem we should be addressing. We need to stop thinking about prison being the adult version of sitting in time-out and start thinking about it in terms of rehabilitation so that released prisoners can better reintegrate.

Reducing privatization of prisons is the first step. Prisons as a profit center is just legalized slavery.

Less than 9% of prisoners are in private prisons, so I don't think that would make a significant difference. I mean it might be a good thing to do, but won't help the vast majority of prisoners.

Also need to consider the privately owned industrial complex built up around prisons. Just like defense contractors built up around the military.

The "food" providers, communication "providers", the companies paying virtually nothing for labor, etc. The folks focusing on the raw percentage of prisoners forced to stay in private prisons are missing the forest for the trees.

There are also police unions which seem to promote much worse policies than regular public service unions.

> so I don't think that would make a significant difference.

I think it would make a significant difference to the prisoners at these prisons

Sure, but the grandparent was talking about how it's not uncommon to have no TV, bad food, etc. in prison. Given that private prisons are uncommon, clearly privatization isn't the main cause of these problems.

The percentage of inmates in private prisons is about 8% of the prison pop in the US. New Zealand and Australia top us at 11 and 19%.

The issue goes beyond privatization.

Is there a prison review website? Let's say I wanted to get sent to the "nicest" prison in the USA (not a white collar "tennis-camp" prison). What crime would I need to commit where to have the highest chance of getting sent there?

Startup idea- RodIronDoor, GlassDoor for prisons?

No books seems unusually cruel. And to what possible benefit?

To be fair, that's not true everywhere, but it is true in many places. Though in some places where it is allowed, someone on the outside has to buy it for you. Not everyone has someone on the outside.

And even when books are allowed, they're often subject to arbitrary restrictions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/banned-books-week-pris...

Stories of prison bring up ideas like this. But I don’t think uniformity in treatment would work.

If a person is in prison for violence then treatment would be no more violent games and videos.

If a person was in prison for theft or gambling related, then treatment would be prohibiting acts that deal with money or games of chance.

If a person was involved in bribery or lying, then treatment would be avoiding anything that involves cheats.

I meant uniformity of rules across institutions. I don't have an issue with different rules for different types of prisoners. Just that those have some uniformity across the various places. Right now, you can do prison time in a county jail (yes, serving an actual sentence in jail), in a state prison, or in a federal prison. The state prisons, particularly, are all over the place on rules and environment. And those serving sentences in county jails are also typically getting the short end of the stick, as the facility rules aren't made for long-term inmates.

The abolitionist movement has been mostly dormant since the reconstruction era, but seems to be alive again this past year.

We need to ensure that these dots are connected; prisons are not only the moral successor to slavery, but the literal legal framework by which it continues.

Strictly speaking, slavery is not against the law in the United States; this carve out in the 13th amendment was seized upon immediately and remains with us today.

One of the biggest in progress "reforms" is decriminalizing marijuana and end of the "war on drugs" in general. Keeping 20% of prison population from ever going there.

I sometimes wonder, since prison is meant for those who commit crimes, so presumably when society decided prison is appropriate for certain crimes, didn't that mean automatically no social interaction for prisoners, since the ideal society would not have (any other) criminals? If yes, that would mean solitary confinement is the only real imprisonment.

There are lot's of other ways to take this question with this line of reasoning but I'll leave it at this for now.

This comes from a common mindset that people in prison deserve no rights because they broke the law. They don't take into account the fact that there are people there who don't deserve to be (either because they are innocent, or because the law they violated was unjust), and if incarcerated people have "no rights", then they can't fight for their freedom.

Interesting. I once had a language professor from cold-war era Czechoslavakia. He was in the military and had to stand around in formations for hours. He found a like-minded friend and played chess 'in their heads' as they stood.

Extra: After he moved to the USA, he applied his mental skills to poker where he became a world-class lowball player.

> And on top of everything, board games—including chess—have been completely banned to promote social distancing.

Well that sucks.

When I was I high school I played some mental chess against the school’s star player. (He could beat me when he alone was blindfold.) I’m not a great chess player but I was surprised how far it was possible to play before making a mistake. Gives me hope in case I should end up behind bars.

Somewhat related: Playing the video game Mike Tyson's Punch Out while blindfolded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT6JEOC3D8

That’s inspiring, and also depressing, worth a read though. I feel keeping a whole game in your head is a good way to deal being locked up,

In high school there was a kid who could play blindfolded. As someone who has no mind's eye this completely blew my mind.

To me the state of US prisons reveals a really dark aspect to US culture and that is there's a real penchant for... cruelty. Like here's just a partial list of major problems just off the top of my head:

- The essentially institutionalized use of rape as a means of controlling inmates;

- Ridiculously long sentences for relatively minor offences as just another casualty of the disastrous war on drugs;

- commissaries as a profit center with ridiculously marked up prices;

- ridiculous costs for telephone calls as another profit center, making it more difficult for inmates to maintain social ties to family;

- prisoners count as citizens but can't vote. Also prisons are jobs. This makes prisons the perfect tool for gerrymandering and pork barreling;

- being charged (not convicted but _charged) with a felony while on parole violates your parole and can send you back to prison to serve the remainder of your sentence. I don't know how this passes the due process test;

- Overcharging to force plea deals;

- Paying prisoners <5c/hour;

- Forcing prisoners to pay a co-pay to see a doctor. $2-5 might not sound like much but it is at 5c/hour;

- Female prisoners may need to see a doctor to get adequate tampons or sanitary napkins. See above for why that's a problem;

- 5c/hour incentivized individuals and private companies to use prison labour to undercut real competitors;

- You don't really have a choice: working is typically mandatory;

- Prison food. 'Nuff said.

- The "are you a felon?" scarlet letter you'll carry for the rest of your life. This actually causes problems even for the ultra-rich. As one example, it has caused real problems for Mark Wahlberg, such that at one point he sought a pardon from the Massachussetts governor for what was a fairly vicious assault when he was young. That effort failed. I absolutely oppposed the Wahlberg pardon. He shouldn't get an exemption. Reform this stupid system instead;

- Early release prisoners having to pay for their own drug tests where they have huge problems even finding a job as a felon in the first place;

- Disenfranchising felons in fairly stupid ways that are clearly a form of voter suppression ie they can't vote for really no good reason;

- Overcrowding;

- Privatizing of prisons;

- Having a delay between parole being granted and the prisoner being released. This is so dumb. This allows other prisoners to "tax" the parolee as any infraction during that period may violate their conditions of release. In comparison I saw a show about a prison in Mexico where a prisoner was called intot he warden's office, told he'd been freed and he was immediately free to go (probably for this "taxing" reason). I was honestly surprised at how humane Mexican prisons seemed in this show (compared to their US equivalents);

I don't think it's an understatement to call the US prison system to be a humanitarian crisis and a blight on the soul of the country.

You had so many more points to make, but your first one stuck out to me:

> - The essentially institutionalized use of rape as a means of controlling inmates;

It's super messed up that, although we make a big deal about rape in our culture, when it comes to someone going to prison, even for nonviolent offenses in some cases, it's socially acceptable to joke about men being anally raped in prison. I suppose there are some especially bad people whom I'd care less about being raped, honestly, but I think it's kind of sick to wish that upon someone. In some ways it's worse than admitting to wanting someone dead because it's intended to be especially sadistic and humiliating. It's sexist as well; just imagine the kind of response someone would get if they joked about a woman getting raped in prison. If you're a man, Americans believe you deserve to get raped if you commit a crime, or are at least callously indifferent to it.

Perhaps presenting the for-profit system with more profitable uses for the space is the way out, for better or worse. For example, Louisiana has filled empty space with ICE detainees at a higher rate per resident. Something to take into account with reform.

Can you share more about how amazing Mexican prisons are? I can only find stuff like this:

"Mexico’s Prisoners Face Extortion Fees to Live: Report"

https://insightcrime.org/news/brief/mexico-prisoners-face-ex...

"Murders, corruption and crime: The hell of Mexican prisons"

https://www.thejournal.ie/mexican-prisons-3418092-Jun2017/

"Mexican prisons: over 500 riots per year"

https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/english/mexican-prisons-over-...

But of course these can't be right since you saw a television show that portrayed them in a grand humanitarian light, and how could that possibly be inaccurate?

Your sarcastic and condescending tone detracts from your point and from the conversation. You could say the same thing in a polite and genuine way and be more likely to attract meaningful responses.

I’ve had serious issues with the judicial system in this country for years now, but banning board games is just a new level of absurd.

How a system so unjust can exist in a modern “democracy” is beyond me.

Did you read the article? It's a COVID related restriction - not a judicial system one.

> It's a COVID related restriction - not a judicial system one.

I'm not sure what that means - just that it is an administrative restriction rather than something adjudicated in a court of law?

This doesn't make it less absurd, and might make it more.

That seems like the new "reason" -- at least it's more valid than the old reason of "stopping gambling". There was a documentary, Netflix maybe?, where guards would routinely do sweeps and find any game pieces that prisoners has made - paper folded to make dice, notes and score sheets for D&D, etc

Let the inmates decide for themselves. I’m sure they’ve had enough “we’re doing this for your own good” for a lifetime

The problem is that they're not only deciding for themselves, they're also deciding for their cellmates, and anyone else they will be in close contact with (which, in a prison, is likely "everyone")

That’s fair, I forgot how closely packed everyone is

RTFA everyone. Board games weren't banned out of an abundance of malice.

No policy is ever enacted in such a way that an abundance of malice is the express basis.

This restriction has no basis in science or sense. A respiratory pathogen may provide another in a long line of childish excuses, but make no mistake: slavery itself is an abundance of malice.

Where did slavery come into this?

"except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" [0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

A common advice is to avoid playing anything in prison. You will always be forced to pay something if you loose (and you probably will loose because people don't play fair there) even if you didn't intend to bet.

A more common advice is to avoid prison in the first place. And if you are there ... I believe prison culture has differences, just like on the outside world.

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